Monday, April 26, 2010

"It is indeed an oddity that the court absent Stevens consists of 6 Catholics and 2 Jews. I have joked in the past that it's a fair offset for the overrepresentation of WASPs in the Congress (and until 2009, the presidency)."

That does seem rather surprising. Perhaps an unusual number of Catholics took to the law in the USA 40-50 years ago? A sort of 'Kennedy effect' we didn't know about?

Not really that surprising. Both Catholicism and Judaism have traditions of legal interpretation (canon law for Catholicism and Talmudic interpretation in Judaism). Protestantism in most of its forms looks to the Bible as the one and only source. You don't have the same tradition of dispute and resolution.